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Kleptocracy Rising: The Short Eventful Life of the Corporate State of Trumplandia

Just about every Trumpeted nominee for high office has obvious conflicts of interest with upholding the public trust, no less the United States Constitution. At the core of the problem is their basic attitude toward government itself. They furtively frame their intentions in the most patriotic sounding rhetoric they can muster. However, they are corporatists; they would prefer that corporations run the country, not heaven forbid the people or our representatives. Don’t get me wrong; we have plenty of problems with our “representative democracy” itself.

Trump Orders Greatness

As it is, the corporations pay our legislative representatives to work for them, not for us. We pay their comfortable salaries, generous health insurance and pensions, but the corporations pay for what really counts – the right to write or at least dictate the writing of laws. Corporatists are inherently anti-democratic. They want the government to work in their interests alone, thereby maximizing their power. They used to call that fascism, which is synonymous with corporate tyranny.

Simply put, the Trumpeted nominees oppose the fundamental purposes for which the institutions they want to administer were established. Moreover, their core values directly contradict the very concept of public service. The obvious analogy to these Trumpist Trolls running the government would be putting the fox in charge of the henhouse. They want to eat the hens and tear down the henhouse. Plunder is their preference.

Most entrepreneurs are at least somewhat predatory. They seek opportunities to profit from the conditions around them. In doing so, they often build great companies providing great products to the public, or perhaps to the Defense Department – because it is profitable. Trump’s Trolls are a cut below…

The Trumpeting of Inauthenticity

Predatory corporatists are a different breed. They want a stable system that they can control. They have no interest in producing anything other than greater power for themselves – certainly not the public interest. Nothing is sacred to them, including ethics, other than acquiring more money and power. Only their self-righteousness matches their evil. These highly skilled opportunists are super-predators.

As if that were not enough, most of these Trumpists are corporate crooks or shills, with an occasional congressional bribe-taker or self-dealer thrown in. Of course, their outlook fits perfectly with that of their new boss. Their Trumpery is nearly transparent. I need not go into much detail here; they are all over the nomination-hearings news. The shortest way to summarize this attempted robbery of the commonwealth is this:

Trumpery Defined

In each case, one form or another of the protection of the public from corporate predators is now under direct attack by the corporate kleptocracy itself, by Trump assigning activist predators the task of blatantly taking over – in order to disempower or destroy them – the institutions that were put in place to protect us from them. An anti-environmental activist will oversee environmental protection. A billionaire fundamentalist privatizer will oversee public education. The long-term CEO of Exxon-Mobile, poised to cut deals for petroleum profits at the expense of the health of the people and planet, will run the State Department. Rick Perry is to head the Department of Energy, which, although he could not remember its name at the time, he wanted to abolish, until nominated to direct it. The list goes on.

From One Great Transformation to Another

In 1944, Karl Polanyi explained in his now classic economic history of the rise of industrial capitalism, that the industrial revolution constituted a Great Transformation of society. A fundamental transformation of the relationship between society and economic activity was central to the process of industrialization.

Industrial capitalists invested large amounts in building factories in towns and cities. Industrial capital financed the “enclosure” of small traditional farms in the British Isles, combining them into larger tracts for the new industrialized agricultural operations, much of which would produce wool and other products for export. They simply evicted people who had worked the land for many generations under relations of mutual obligation with their land owners. People would have to buy the food they had formerly produced for themselves. The enclosures destroyed landed communities, their culture and traditions, along with their means of livelihood. Seeking new work to survive forced them to migrate near the new factories. This transformed society and caused great suffering along with increased production.

Polanyi pointed out that from the beginning, governments made efforts to protect society and its people from the damaging effects of predatory capital, beginning with the British poor laws. Later, in the U.S., the classic defense of the people against predatory capital was the New Deal and its legal protections from destructive speculation by the financial elites, which had crashed both the stock market and the economy with it. Those protections lasted until repealed by corporatist politicians like Clinton and Bush, who brought in Wall Street executives to run the U.S. Treasury and direct government economic policy. When it all collapsed in the Great Recession of 2008, their first and only impulse was to bail out the banks and other financial manipulators, not their victims, who were mere citizens.

It took a couple of centuries of the growth of industrial capital, but now we are at the culmination of the first Great Transformation, even as we feel the beginnings of a New Great Transformation that we have yet to properly recognize no less try to control. The system of predatory extractive capital driving an industrial-consumer society has reached its peak. Its sources of power are beginning to fade as resources deplete and the climate destabilizes. The industrial-consumer economy will either fade away or go out with a flash, in an accelerated race for what’s left of the planet’s resources, leaving its accumulated electronic funny-money increasingly worthless.

The Narcissist and the Other

It is perversely fitting, though tragic, that a narcissistic sociopathic predatory capitalist with pretentions of royalty should take the helm of the political system at this critical juncture in history. In the U.S., politics once formed the bulwark of protection of citizens and their land from the damage caused by the predations of extractive-industrial capital. That is what the New Deal, the poverty programs and the environmental protection laws were all about. However, the ascendancy of Trump and his Trolls does suggest that the financialized system of predatory corporate economic growth will more likely go out in a flash than simply fade away.

As Polanyi pointed out, economic activity had always conformed to cultural norms until the industrial revolution inverted the relationship between economy and society. Human values constrained economic behavior until the industrial revolution. The rule of industrial capital over society has grown stronger ever since. Now, the predatory economic system dominates even more powerfully, distorting culture and suppressing human rights. The corporate state compels society to fit its interests and its illusion of endless growth and power, bolstered by the fake science of mainstream economics. The utopian dreams of neoliberal economic theory, promoted in academia and the mass media, and funded by corporate benefactors, have penetrated the thinking of many people today. Such are the dreams of narcissistic sociopathy.

In the eyes of the Great Narcissist, we are all the Other; we are the Muslim, we are the immigrant, we are the racial or gender minority, we are the presumptively dangerous refugee, we are the Other America, we are the evil journalist who would dare to challenge “alternative facts.” We are all the Stranger, the Outsider, because we are merely the people. Remember, narcissism involves lack of empathy. Insensitivity to the needs of others breeds paranoia.

But a New Great Transformation has already begun. The damage done by the omnipresent economic machine has already reached proportions that make the continuation of that leviathan impossible beyond just a few more decades. Climate destabilization, along with financial crises, armed conflicts around the world, crop failures, droughts, floods, forced migrations of a magnitude unimagined by the xenophobic anti-refugee Trumpeteers of today, will bring it all down rather soon. Either the New Great Transformation will produce a new form of ecological human communities or it will spiral down into chaos and societal collapse. Right now, the odds are not looking good.

All the immigrant hating, racist, sexist, homophobic, disability-ridiculing, xenophobic, misogynistic, violence-encouraging demagoguery, we have seen before. It did not end well then and with the addition of the perverse denial of global warming and its imminent catastrophic consequences made into public policy, it will not end well now. Unless, of course, citizens everywhere rise up as they have in recent days at airports across the U.S. in outrage against persecutory anti-immigrant policies of disturbingly indecent and unconstitutional character.

The current kleptocracy will not likely survive very long. But will chaos and societal collapse be its legacy? Only if we let it.

2 thoughts on “Kleptocracy Rising: The Short Eventful Life of the Corporate State of Trumplandia”

Thank you Lucy for the comment. You raise an unfortunately perennial question. Underlying it all may be the widely ignored fact that concentrated power makes it easier to gain even more power. Demagogic skill helps too, especially when combined with widespread frustration and anger with the fact that the government has not looked after the public interest, but consistently chooses to support corporate interests that conflict with the public interest.
However, despite the dire circumstances, I disagree with the “we are doomed” hypothesis. We may very well be doomed, but what is our alternative? Throw up our hands, capitulate, and descend into self-indulgent whimpering or gluttony?
One of my favorite quotes is that of Chris Hedges: “I fight fascism not because I think I will win; I fight fascists because they are fascists.” The point is, we really cannot predict the future, we can only do what we can to make it better. That is why I am neither a pessimist nor an optimist. Rather, I am a Hopeful Realist. Hope may ebb and flow with the events we experience and/or contribute to, but I retain some as long as I breathe.

What has always baffled and distressed me is that the lowest of humans in terms of ethics, wisdom, and self-reflection seem to rise to power as if propelled by some perverse form of anti-life evolution. How is this so? Yourself, for example, in a sane world, would occupy some position of power and influence. Ninety percent of my friends show characteristics that would make them infinitly more fit for power than our current stable of fools. Why does someone of the calibre of an Eckhart Tolle, a Marcus Aurelius (who did break the most foolish risest highest rule), a Plotinus not rise to power? Because it seems, in fact, to be the reverse, I believe, sadly, we are doomed as a species.